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Why Bother with What Three Words?

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Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#271

Post by duskwuff »

chrisrhoden wrote: post #205
retroafroman wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember they pitched Mongolia as a place this would be used, but I fail to see how it actually would be. I haven't been back to Mongolia since this came out, but I would bet good money that no one (besides whatever government entity signed onto (bribed/schmoozed) the project) would use this. English isn't that common among nomads that it would make any sense. Everyone knows the Latin alphabet, but reading and writ…

It is localized to other languages, as explained in the article. One of the complaints in the article is that the different localizations offer uneven quality.

> One of the complaints in the article is that the different localizations offer uneven quality.

And there's no publicly documented way to convert between the localizations. It's not even clear that there's a 1:1 correspondence between the word lists!

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#272

Post by pbalau »

ajuc wrote: post #8
jpatokal wrote: post #4

There are plenty of alternatives to W3W, most notably Open Location Codes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code Alternatively, try a W3W parody: https://what3emojis.com/ http://www.what3fucks.com (NSFW text)

The emojis one have the nice property that close addresses share some words.

So does the other one.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#273

Post by roywiggins »

Anarch157a wrote: post #259
7952 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with those kind of numbers is that they are easy to get wrong by a couple of digits. Think about how difficult it can be to read a number over the phone. And guessing distances seems like a pretty unusual thing to do. Especially as latitude/longitude is a terrible system for that anyway. Small distances are very small numbers and hard to think about. It is possible to make a spelling mistake in what three…

> Think about how difficult it can be to read a number over the phone. Same thing is true for words, there are words in my native portuguese that are dificult to tell from each other even in person , imagine by phone. If some one misunderstands a word and it's valid on a combination? For example (in portuguese), Paca.Tatu.Cotia (Paca.Armadilo.Agouti in english) can be misheard as Maca.Tatu.Quati (Stretcher.Armadilo.C…

The NATO alphabet was built to solve nearly exactly this problem. It's quite verbose (by design).

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#274

Post by wildrhythms »

rsync wrote: post #212
jccalhoun wrote: post #65

Mostly off topic: I would like a URL shortener that uses a similar system so that instead of giving me small.url/b3DmQ it would be small.url/MouseHatDoor because I will sometimes share a link with my students and there is always one student who can't get it to work because they type it wrong or something. I can send them the link through a course announcement but it is more convenient to put a short url on screen and…

"I can send them the link through a course announcement but it is more convenient to put a short url on screen and have them go there." I hope you will look at "Oh By Codes": https://0x.co/ Standard URL shortening (although with no tracking or cookies or javascript) but you can also shorten non-urls. There's a normal FAQ on the page, but also an "HN FAQ": https://0x.co/hnfaq.html

Chrome gave me a NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID when attempting to visit https://0x.co/

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#275

Post by alexbecker »

mirimir wrote: post #240
mdonahoe wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If anything, they should have designed it such that it follows an IP style system where you get more precise/specific with each period..." I think it is interesting that you say that, because I see this system as DNS system on top of IP. So latlong is your IP, and W3W is your human-readable domain name. Which begs the question: would a better system involve letting people pay to register names that point to latlongs…

> So latlong is your IP, and W3W is your human-readable domain name. No, it's not. It's actually more like the opposite. The domain name system is hierarchical, and W3W is clearly (and I gather, intentionally) not. IP addresses are also hierarchical, but the mapping of domain names to them is only somewhat systematic. Really, though, W3W identifiers are most like Tor onion names. Just hashes. Indeed, some have sugges…

For most users, the domain name system is only very nominally hierarchical--every domain name they see is of this form:

(www.)?[random-words].com

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#276

Post by ltbarcly3 »

There is so much "righteous indignation" in this thread!

I get that this Three Words thing might not be perfect, but a lot of the criticisms in the posting are nonsense. The furthest anything moved in the Japan earthquake was around 2.5 meters. Why act like this is some kind of deal breaker? If you had used latitude and longitude it would still be wrong by 2.5 meters if you didn't update it after the quake.

Some people had an idea, built it out, and everyone here is losing their minds, I don't get it?

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#277

Post by rtkwe »

duskwuff wrote: post #271
chrisrhoden wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is localized to other languages, as explained in the article. One of the complaints in the article is that the different localizations offer uneven quality.

> One of the complaints in the article is that the different localizations offer uneven quality. And there's no publicly documented way to convert between the localizations. It's not even clear that there's a 1:1 correspondence between the word lists!

It's clear in the article that the lists don't map so you can't even translate between them without going back to W3W and running it through their stuff.

> So, if I want to tell a French speaker where ///mile.crazy.shade is, I have to use ///embouchure.adjuger.saladier

> Loosely translated back as ///mouth.award.bowl an entirely different location!

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#278

Post by ltbarcly3 »

kevinventullo wrote: post #249
turc1656 wrote: post #195

The author didn't touch upon what I think is the biggest issue with this. I can be pretty damn sure that 51.50799,-0.12803 is really close to 51.51799,-0.12803 and even closer to 51.50800,-0.12803 just by looking at the numbers because they follow a decimal precision style location system. However, I have no idea if mile.crazy.shade is next to mouth.award.bowl or if they are 1,0000 miles apart. If anything, they shou…

Mathematically, I would phrase this by saying that the mapping of physical location to (lat,lon) pair is continuous . Space-filling curves and related things like Google's plus codes are nearly as good, in that (if you squint) they are continuous almost everywhere (everywhere but the boundary of some grid). W3W on the other hand is discontinuous everywhere. I think the advantage of lat/lon boils down to the fact that…

So you have to be careful with the terminology. Space filling curves can be a continuous mapping of the line to the curve itself. However, this does not set up a continuous mapping from the space to the coordinate system, which is also quite important.

A tiny change in your coordinate will mean a tiny change in your physical position, but a tiny change in your physical position will almost always mean a quite large (and basically not predictable without doing an involved calculation) change in your coordinate.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#279

Post by rtkwe »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #276

There is so much "righteous indignation" in this thread! I get that this Three Words thing might not be perfect, but a lot of the criticisms in the posting are nonsense. The furthest anything moved in the Japan earthquake was around 2.5 meters. Why act like this is some kind of deal breaker? If you had used latitude and longitude it would still be wrong by 2.5 meters if you didn't update it after the quake. Some peop…

2.5 meters is a problem in W3W. The squares are 3mx3m so most things are going to change "location." Combine that with the nonlocality of the W3W encoding and suddenly anything used has a completely different 'address' where with traditional latitude and longitude 2.5 meters doesn't drastically change.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#280

Post by _kst_ »

"If we, what3words ltd, are ever unable to maintain the what3words technology ..., then we will release our source code into the public domain. We will do this in such a way and with suitable licences ..."

What are "suitable licences" for the public domain?

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